Bad luck or poor choices: Portraits of the homeless

Published: Saturday, July 20, 2013 at 03:43 PM.

“These tents still leak,” he adds. Damp clothes and mold are a continual hassle.

And then there’s the endless pressure. “You’re on the lam,” he says. “You keep a low profile — as low as you can get.”

The police know their whereabouts, and Roger and his friends wait daily while the officers track down the landowners in Raleigh. If those landowners want them to leave — and they usually do — they will have to evacuate. Finding themselves homeless from even this rudimentary home is one of his biggest worries of all.

***

Then there’s Don, an elderly man who was raised in New Bern. “Piss-poor planning” and hard living got him where he is today, he says: a bed at RCS.

Don, from a middle-class family, knows he has had opportunities in his life. He admits to hard drinking and claims he has done drug smuggling.

I meet him in his dorm — a Spartan hall of bunk beds and lockers lined up against walls decorated mostly with rules.

Note: Unless otherwise noted, the names of the homeless subjects interviewed have been changed..

Days of rain and humidity have left this patch of woods downright steamy, and I almost expect Tarzan to swing by. Following a trail, I soon come upon some homeless squatters.

This encampment does not scream “homeless.” Three colorful tents are spread beneath a canopy of trees. Bottles of laundry soap, shoes and other items are neatly set about them and clotheslines stretch between the trees. Two bicycles lean against tree trunks: They are “Walmart” variety, but they’re in good shape. A couple of people sit by one tent, chatting, unaware of me.

This place seems more KOA than homeless to me.

But this is, indeed, an encampment of homeless men and women, squatting on private property in town. They are friendly, if a bit suspicious.

One, Roger — “Don’t use my real name. I don’t want people to recognize me” — consents to an interview.

As we talk, I remind myself that you must sometimes take what an indigent person tells you with a grain of salt. Sometimes with a tablespoon of the stuff. Even their exaggeration is layered over truth, however. And so the following stories are not always verifiable, but they are the words of the people I’ve interviewed.

***

His is the smallest tent, about 6 feet by 6 feet, and on closer inspection, my family campground visions start to fade.

Empty whiskey bottles lay beside the front door. A quarter-full bottle lies inside, along with other elements of his life: an electric guitar, a battery-powered amp, personal belongings dangling in netting from the roof. A frozen food container is filled with ash and cigarette butts whose stale smell permeates the place. Beside them, opened cans of Great Value and Del Monte vegetables and fruits.

A Denver native, he thinks New Bern is a great place to live. Motioning toward the town, he grins. “This is really Ozzie and Harriet over here,” he says.

Like many others, he began his homeless journey as the result of a personal crisis.

Roger and his wife were trying what he described as “risky” entrepreneurial ventures when she was diagnosed with cancer. When she died in 2003, he was left with a huge mortgage and massive medical bills.

“I took up side work and tried to make it for awhile,” he said. He also had a small pension “but I had nobody… things began to cave in.”

The house went under. He loaded up his truck one day and hit the road.

“I started driving here and there, renting a room or two a couple of nights, kind of binge drinking,” he said.

At Atlantic Beach, he was pulled over and an unregistered gun was found in the car. Charged with DWI and weapons charges, he says he spent 10 days in jail. When he got out, he couldn’t afford to get the truck out of impound and lost it.

He visited New Bern briefly and got thrown out of the RCS shelter when he fought with a fellow resident.

Hotels quickly drained his pension and so most of his homeless life has been “streetwise,” much of it in larger cities, where “you can pretty much backpack it, sleep in the street. Just kind of lay down wherever you need to.”

With nothing more than a backpack and a “good ground cloth,” one can pick up and move quickly when trouble comes.

Police are often a problem, he said, in part because of old charges against him. In some towns, officers took a disliking to him and would follow him around looking for an excuse to arrest him.

But the New Bern police, he says, seem much kinder. They remind him, in fact, of Andy Griffith.

He recently returned to New Bern “on his heels” where he met his fellow tenters who were having coffee at Joe Muggs.

“They could see I was hauling all my stuff,” he said, “so they invited me to join them.” New at tenting, he considers himself the kindergartener of the group.

The other tenters include a young couple, unmarried, and an older man who works at night and sleeps during the day. Everyone follows a few basic rules and they watch out for one another’s things. The camp is unusually clean for a homeless gathering, he says, and he claims it to be drug free. He’s a heavy smoker with a cough to prove it. He claims he drinks only for fun; “I don’t need it.”

He makes jewelry and occasionally trades it but almost never sells it: “I’m more of a give-it-away kind of guy.”

He faces a lot of challenges, such as how to charge a cell phone, vital as his only means of communication.

“These tents still leak,” he adds. Damp clothes and mold are a continual hassle.

And then there’s the endless pressure. “You’re on the lam,” he says. “You keep a low profile — as low as you can get.”

The police know their whereabouts, and Roger and his friends wait daily while the officers track down the landowners in Raleigh. If those landowners want them to leave — and they usually do — they will have to evacuate. Finding themselves homeless from even this rudimentary home is one of his biggest worries of all.

***

Then there’s Don, an elderly man who was raised in New Bern. “Piss-poor planning” and hard living got him where he is today, he says: a bed at RCS.

Don, from a middle-class family, knows he has had opportunities in his life. He admits to hard drinking and claims he has done drug smuggling.

I meet him in his dorm — a Spartan hall of bunk beds and lockers lined up against walls decorated mostly with rules.

“If you hang around this place, it’s depressing as hell,” he said. His hobbies are obvious: a pair of fishing poles lean in a corner.

“I was living a happy-go-lucky life,” he says. “Here I am, 69. I never even thought about reaching 60.”

He’s been homeless about a year and at RCS a little over two months, which means he’ll max out his stay in a couple of weeks. He had stayed his 90 days at Greenville’s shelter before moving into a tent by Vidant Medical Center. There are other homeless living in tents around Greenville, he says, mainly in commercial districts.

He developed chest pains and found himself inside Vidant for a week, being treated for blood clots in his lungs. Not knowing what else to do, he called Juliet Rogers, the RCS director of shelter services. Although he had been at RCS before, she invited him back again.

“She’s a very caring and understanding person,” he says.

He is on prescription medicine, which he gets through the MERCI Clinic on Tatum Drive.

Don says he is a divorcee who has put himself out of work from injuries after rolling his car three different times.

“Drinking was usually the cause,” he says. “I was burning the candle at both ends.”

Still, he looks at the bright side: “I feel lucky I’m here.”

He has found God, he says, and is turning his life around, working at making amends with his two children while visiting friends about town — most who don’t know his situation — and spends a lot of time fishing.

He is waiting, he says, on some inheritances to come through and he hopes for disability claims to come through so he can afford a catamaran to use as a home.

***

Reggie leans comfortably back in his chair, shifts the backward ball cap on his head, and says, “First of all, I’m an addict.”

He is in his late 50s and doing some work at a local ministry. He sleeps in the back of a ministry truck sometimes; other times he sleeps in a house where he pays some rent and deals with overcrowding and a serious infestation of bedbugs. And he is a regular user of crack.

“Sometimes I go down, I get a twenty-five dollar rock,” he allows. He says he wants no intervention counseling but insists he will cure himself of his addiction by the time he is 60 — as a way of honoring his late grandmother, who raised him.

He sometimes stays in a trailer without electricity. “I haven’t been there for three days,” he says. “It might be 15 people when I go there. You never know.”

Reggie says he was born in New Bern to a 10-year-old girl. He graduated from New Bern in 1973.

“I’ve done real good and I’ve done real bad,” he says. For a time he went to New York where he says he managed stores and tried to get together with his mother — who wanted nothing to do with it.

He came back to New Bern because “This is my home. This is where I’d like to pass away.”

He has 11 children, he says, birthed by four different mothers. He says none are in the area but claims to be in touch. “My grandma raised me to be a husband, a father.”

Like Don, he is trying to get disability so that he can buy his late grandmother’s house and have a home.

***

Amy, whom we’ve already met, is homeless in the city as a result of domestic abuse. She lost her three sons to foster care when she was evicted from her apartment. Suffering neurological problems as a result of beatings, she is unable to do many of the kinds of work that might help her to get back her children and go on with her life.

Still she looks for work.

“With narcolepsy,” she says, “I have to rethink what I can do. …I’m working hard at it. Until I get my boys back, I’ll work 18, 19 hours a day, if I have to.”

Asked if she has a specific goal, she says: “Realistically, I’m shooting for a couple of months to get my life back on track. I know it’s not going to happen overnight.”

She has no interest in being on public assistance for long, but aims to provide for her family on her own. Ultimately she wants to go back to school to become a school counselor, possibly specializing in dealing with troubled youth.

On most days, she rises and generally and breakfasts at RCS around 8. Then she does chores around the shelter and goes to her various counseling and health appointments. She may spend part of the day filling out applications or in the library, researching her options on the computers.

Once the heat of the day returns, she returns to the shelter and helps out. “If I keep myself busy, I can keep myself happy,” she says.

Along with her family and pride, homelessness has cost her many of her friends.

“I have my sister that I keep in contact with, but the friends couldn’t deal (with my situation) and they abandoned me,” she says. “It makes you re-look at the term ‘friends.’ True friends are very hard to find.”

Amy has found a few at the shelter, she believes, both among the volunteers and staff and among her fellow homeless.

“We’ve almost taken to each other like an extended family,” she says. “They worry about you. It’s so sweet ‘cause they’re the first ones who’ve shown concern.”

Amy is willing to have her real name used and to pose for a picture.

“I don’t mind sharing my story because hopefully it will help someone,” she says. “(Being homeless) is the hardest thing to do. I’m not going to lie about it.” But she sees a light at the end of the tunnel.

And for the time being? “I keep a smile on my face, move on and help the next person.”

***

I was at one of those 24-hour breakfast diners ordering a lunch and asking about that diner’s reputation for giving out the occasional free meal to the local homeless when Gina, one of the waitresses, looked at me in surprise.

“Being homeless?” she asked. “Oh, I know all about that.”

She is working now and thankful for it, but back in May, she was living in a truck with her 5-year-old daughter, her fiancé, George, and his rather large dog.

Her story is a mixture of, shall we say, marital blitz, loss of a job and medical emergencies.

She and her fiancé lived in Kentucky, where she had divorced a husband who, she said, was too much under his mother’s thumb. She was living with George’s sister when she was thrown out “over a bunch of tulips my daughter picked out of her back yard. The tulips apparently had sentimental value and she went ballistic.”

Both Gina and George worked in a factory in Kentucky when an auto accident put her temporarily out of work. George left his job long enough to be her caretaker and when they were ready to start again, Gina says, they were dismissed from their jobs.

“We’d been working less than 90 days, so they didn’t have to give us a reason,” she said.

With nowhere to live, the family came to Craven County where George has relatives. Once here, however, they found the family could not help them. And neither, she said, could anyone else.

“I found an amazing lack of help for the homeless,” she said. “We’ve tried to get help from churches. They couldn’t help us. They had no idea where to get help.”

She said shelters were not a choice as, being unmarried, they could not stay in the same room. Besides, the shelters, she said, would not let them keep the dog. As to public housing, she was told she would have to be put on a waiting list behind several other families.

“We would probably be waiting a year,” she said.

And so they settled into life in a Dodge Durango. They slept in Food Lion and church parking lots. They would set the truck’s alarm, she said, so that no one could get in and her daughter could not slip out without alerting them. She and George usually slept in the front seat of the truck; in the back seat, her daughter would curl up on one side of the seat while the dog curled up in her daughter’s child seat.

For food, the little family lived off food stamps they’d brought from Kentucky. With no place to cook, “We ate a lot of sandwiches.”

One of her greatest concerns is being able to keep her daughter: “She is my life.” Gina has to send Kentucky evidence that she is able to take care of her child if she is going to keep custody.

For Gina, things are beginning to work out. She landed a part-time job at the diner and, after 10 days in the truck, found a trailer park where the manager is giving her a break — no rent for the portion of May in which she lived there and a the chance to pay her deposit over time rather than right away.

She needs more work, she says, and George is looking as well. Both are enrolled at an area community college. He is looking to a career in law enforcement while she hopes to become a translator. (“I speak several languages,” she says.)

Her daughter will also start school in the fall and is excited at the idea that all three of them will be competing for the best grade.

During their time of homelessness, Gina said they were never harassed, but it was a constant worry.

“I don’t know which is worse,” she said, “my daughter saying, ‘Mommy, are we ever going to get a home?’ or ‘Mommy, why won’t that nice lady let us stay?’”